The Conformist

Ever prone to grandly sweeping statements, poet Ezra Pound once claimed literature is news that stays news. He meant the same for any art seeking more than entertainment so if several decades past its release we watch Bernardo Bertolucci's 1970 The Conformist, based on a 1951 novel and set in a 1938 milieu unfamiliar to most Americans, a couple of questions come up. Is it still news? Or is it a relic from the tail end of the art house boom? A superb new DVD from Paramount allows us to say definitively "both and neither." The Conformist is such a dense tapestry of burnished light, pensive tracking shots, stylized set design and painterly compositions that it's nearly impossible to avoid words like "ravishing" and "sensual." (Francis Ford Coppola was one of the many entranced; he didn't hesitate to borrow while making the first two Godfather movies.) Though The Conformist pokes at psychology, at conformity and politics, it doesn't poke too hard, almost as if Bertolucci is afraid of waking a tiger. Maybe there's no real difference, with The Conformist's entire feel being as much what it's "about" as the characters on screen. Or as Bertolucci put it in one interview, film really just expresses film. Don't take Bertolucci completely at his word since The Conformist certainly references more than just itself. The son of a declining aristocratic family, Clerici (Jean Louis Trintignant) wants to set up a normal life. He's helped by a fascist leader who admits being confused by Clerici's motives. He doesn't want money or power so what are his motives? Tight-lipped on this point, Clerici marries a "petty bourgeoise" woman but on his honeymoon to Paris the fascists call in their favor. Clerici's old philosophy professor is now based in Paris and leading the political opposition so the fascists want him killed. (As an in-joke the professor's phone number and address were really Jean-Luc Godard's.) Not only is Clerici confronted with this demand, all the time being followed by a fascist handler, but he finds himself immediately attracted to the professor's young wife. Such a set-up is familiar to some degree and in such a blunt description seems to hang on a "will he or won't he" dilemma. But that's not how the film works. Motivations tend to be opaque and contradictory, not in a self-important, look-Ma-I'm-an-artist manner but more with a true-to-life ambiguity. Just read a few other reviews of the film to see what wildly differing interpretations arise. Clerici is or is not a repressed homosexual. He does or doesn't love his wife. He hesitates to kill the professor because of morals, cowardice or some Hamlet-like indecision. The professor's wife is or is not using him. Some interpretations are more likely than others but it's tricky to nail down exactly what Clerici is after or indeed why many of the other characters act the way they do. Such ambiguity hasn't stopped many critics from claiming that The Conformist is a study of fascism though that's hard to see in the actual film since it's discussed so little and there are so few fascist characters, mainly just Clerici's handler who is little more than a thug. Bertolucci also twists The Conformist by telling it mostly in flashbacks (unlike the novel which goes chronologically). We open the film by watching Clerici leave on a mysterious errand in the 1938 present and then get bits and pieces of his story going back to childhood. Complicating this are a few moments with fantastic elements, maybe Clerici mis-remembering or possibly a surrealist jolt from his unconscious. For instance, he buys a violet from a down-on-her-luck street vendor who then improbably joins with several children in a marching rendition of "The Internationale", all the while Clerici seems almost oblivious as he chats with the professor's wife. Such moments do fit the film's vibrant but artificial tone--this isn't neo-realism after all--and contribute to the feeling of unsettled and unexpressed emotions. Bertolucci doesn't hesitate to deploy other techniques for distancing viewers (not many films make as much use of windows as this one) though not in the jittery modernist manner of, say, Godard. Opera is one obvious reference point. There's no denying that The Conformist, psychologically deep or not, is a landmark of filmmaking bravura. Bertolucci's close collaboration with cinematographer Vittorio Storaro and composer Georges Delerue created a form of introspective spectacle where film-for-film's-sake storytelling--Sternberg and Ophuls as much as MGM house style--is used to depict a harsher world, that conflict between artifice and realism driving the film. While The Conformist's visuals and sound will inevitably be diminished on home video despite the DVD's top-notch transfer, they nevertheless make such an impact that a viewer is likely to realize how the deployment of a "style" in so many current films is merely empty adornment. Bertolucci and his collaborators didn't just decide on a style that fit the story; what they're after finds no real difference between the two. They would have created a vastly different film had it been, say, quasi-documentary and not just because it would have looked different. Almost ground-level tracking shots through the leaves of a decaying estate, the crispness of a brightly snowy forest, an early morning Paris, a dustless radio studio, all these combine to create Clerici's world and show how he thinks. Film may just be film as Bertolucci claimed but then poetry is just words about words and with film it's all in what you do with the images. How The Conformist looks tells us as much about the characters as what they say. The DVD version of The Conformist runs 111 minutes and though there are reports of 115 and 120 minute versions those appear to have been either early or festival cuts or possibly times based on longer closing music. This 111 run time is identical to the 1994 re-release and would seem to be the definitive version. The credits are in English indicating a US print but you can choose spoken Italian, French, English, Spanish or Portuguese with various subtitles. Some have argued that the French-language dialogue could be as acceptable as Italian given the nationality of some main actors and the Paris setting, and considering that all Italian films are actually dubbed into Italian the English is probably not as bad a choice as it might otherwise be. The extras include three short (under 15 minutes) documentaries on the production; all are definitely worthwhile. For more information about The Conformist, visit Paramount Home Entertainment. To order The Conformist, go to TCM Shopping. by Lang Thompson

Synopsis: Marcello Clerici is tormented by memories of a childhood marked by decadent, mentally unstable parents and an early homosexual encounter, during which he shot his seducer. In order to achieve a facade of normality Clerici embraces Italian Fascism, joins with the Secret Service, and marries Giulia, a conventional-minded woman who avoids asking questions about his career. When he accepts an assignment to kill Quadri, a leftist professor currently exiled in Paris, he is forced to confront his own ambivalence. The Conformist (1970), Bernardo Bertolucci's fourth feature and his first genuine international success, remains among the director's most accomplished works to date. It is adapted from the 1951 novel by the Italian writer Alberto Moravia (1907-1990), a major figure in twentieth century Italian literature. Moravia is noted for his psychological realism--inflected with Marx and Freud--and his frank treatment of sexuality and the anxieties of contemporary life. Other Moravia adaptations include Vittorio De Sica's Two Women (1960), Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt (1963), Damiano Damiani's The Empty Canvas (1963) and Francesco Maselli's Time of Indifference (1964). Moravia also worked on several screenplays, most famously Luchino Visconti's Ossessione (1943) and De Sica's Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1963), which is based partly on one of his stories. Moravia's original novel was inspired by the 1937 assassination of two of his cousins in Paris, where they had been working for the Resistance. The narrative closely follows the protagonist Clerici from the incipient sadism of his childhood to his membership in the Secret Service, his complicity in Quadri's death, and finally his spiritual desolation after the fall of Mussolini. Given the impossibility of reproducing Moravia's narrative voice in cinematic terms, Bertolucci instead adopts a complicated flashback structure to suggest the inner workings of Clerici's mind, opening in Paris the morning Quadri is to be assassinated and moving freely back and forth through time. The editing is at its most dense and suggestive in the section surrounding Marcello's fateful encounter with Lino, the chauffeur who attempts to seduce him. Here Bertolucci juxtaposes no less than three layers of time: the day of the assassination, Marcello's confession just before his marriage, and the childhood episode with Lino. In addition to its scrupulous character study of Clerici, Moravia's novel is also noteworthy for its elaborate symbolic structure: Pasqualino "Lino" Seminara, the chauffeur who attempts to seduce the young Marcello, is a defrocked cleric, thus making a deliberate connection with Clerici, the protagonist's last name. Similarly, Professor Quadri's wife is named Lina, thus serving as the female counterpart to Lino. Bertolucci does not retain all these elements--Lina is renamed Anna in the film, for instance, and no mention is made of Seminara's former life as a priest. Instead, the director introduces a rich system of visual metaphors derived from Plato's allegory of the cave to comment on the illusions of politics and sexual desire. Memorable images in this regard include the giant statues carried back and forth in the Minister's vast marble office, the feet passing in front of the street-level window in the restored "dance of the blind" sequence, the painting behind which Marcello disappears near the harbor, and the flickering firelight illuminating Marcello at the end of the film. The Conformist deservedly received an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. Ultimately, what one remembers most is the film's striking visual style, from its elegant lateral tracking shots to its meticulous recreation of Fascist Italy, albeit with deliberate surrealist touches; it is arguably Bertolucci's most beautifully photographed and designed film after The Last Emperor (1987). The Conformist marked Bertolucci's second collaboration with renowned cinematographer Vittorio Storaro and his first with set designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti. The three continued to work together on Last Tango in Paris (1972), The Last Emperor, for which Scarfiotti won an Academy Award, and The Sheltering Sky (1990). (The latter was co-designed by Gianni Silvestri, another regular Bertolucci collaborator.) Up until his premature death at the age of 53 in 1994, Scarfiotti earned a reputation as one of the most talented production designers of his day. Other significant films on which he worked include Luchino Visconti's Death in Venice (1971), Paul Schrader's Cat People (1982) and Barry Levinson's Toys (1992), which received another Academy Award nomination for Best Art Direction. The Conformist was largely well received upon its American release. Vincent Canby of the New York Times admired the complexity with which the film approached the issues of sex and politics, calling it a "decided improvement" over Moravia's novel. He also praised its performances and its visual style, stating that "...not the least of the film's extraordinary beauties is the way it recalls an era." Stanley Kauffmann of The New Republic, on the other hand, was singularly unimpressed, complaining about its fragmented editing and lavish style: "In the filming itself, [Bertolucci] makes very sure we understand that the Age of Cinema has arrived and that he is a leading citizen. No millimeter of the screen is left unpregnant at any moment, no shot is spared heavy meaning." The most thought-provoking critique of the film, however, was by Pauline Kael in the March 27, 1971 issue of The New Yorker. While she declined to call it a "great movie," she nonetheless declared it a "sumptuous, emotionally charged experience." Bertolucci, she wrote, "moves into the past, as he works in the present, with a lyrical freedom almost unknown in the history of movies." She reserved special praise for Jean-Louis Trintignant's performance, writing that he "has an almost incredible intuitive understanding of screen presence." Finally Kael's extended review--really more of a meditation--becomes a lament for the dampening effects of Puritanism, regardless of political affiliation, on the art of film, which she considered "the great sensual medium" and Bertolucci one of its poets. It is a perfect example of why film criticism is so much poorer today without her. Producer: Maurizio Lodi-Fe Director: Bernardo Bertolucci Screenplay: Bernardo Bertolucci, based on the novel by Alberto Moravia Photography: Vittorio Storaro Music: Georges Delerue Editing: Franco Arcalli Production Design: Ferdinando Scarfiotti Costume Design: Gitt Magrini Principal Cast: Jean-Louis Trintignant (Marcello Clerici); Stefania Sandrelli (Giulia); Dominique Sanda (Anna); Enzo Tarascio (Professor Quadri); Gastone Moschin (Manganiello); Jose Quaglio (Italo); Pierre Clementi (Lino); Milly (Marcello's mother); Giusseppe Addobbati (Marcello's father); Yvonne Sanson (Giulia's mother); Pasquale Fortunato (Marcello as a child). C-111m. Letterboxed. by James Steffen